


soda pop canons, after (part i)

by inkspl0tches



Series: the sprite universe [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Family/KidFic but weirder!!!, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Very Big AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:38:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15805077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: On the last and final day, God created little girls. On the last and final day, from Scully’s true rib on her right side, God created daughters without mothers and mothers without sons and so on and so forth. Amen Amen Hallelejuah.--prompt from @enigmaticdr on tumblr: AU post-2012, dystopian, a hardened Mulder and Scully find an abandoned child at the side of the road.





	soda pop canons, after (part i)

**1.**  So. Everything in Mulder’s shit life has mostly always been a chemical equation. About balance. Take from one side, give more to the other. The world ends as it began, as it had middled and turned, turned, turned and the rules do not change. When they come, they’ve gotten the memo. They leave Scully. But they take William.

Oh—and it absolutely guts her. This whole thing. Still smarting from the first time she was left behind by a Mulder man, the emptiness in their son’s bed,  _Star Wars_  sheeted even though at almost twelve he was maybe too old for it, carves her right clean. She is all ribs and sinew, hollowed out. The balance shifts, but does not tilt. After the world ends, there are really no more sides to choose from.  

The worlds revolve.  
  
  
  
  


**2.** And it’s not that their house wouldn’t weather the storm. It was ancient; the thing had roots a mile wide. It was that Scully had burned it down. 

It was that she’d left the wood stove burning too late one night and didn’t check it because who checks things like that when their son is gone, who does things like eat or sleep or talk to their husband or make sure the house doesn’t burn down when their  _son_  is  _gone_. The house burned right into the dirt, and they watched from a mile away, the flames eating the black sky. There hadn’t been stars for months (smoke? smog? some kind of universal vacuum cleaner that cleared them right out?), and Scully put her arms around his waist in the tall grass. Scully said  _I’m sorry_. Scully let him touch her for the first time in a week, a month.

It was very quiet. The flames gasped and breathed until they didn’t. They stood there on the edge of the property, watching their old-roots house go up in flames, until they couldn’t. Then they hit the road, hit gravel and bashed in motels. Hit pretty much everything in sight except each other, crushing abandoned cars and old signposts with her war car, the SUV he’d said was useless, before.  

It was the fact that Scully had burned down the house. It was the fact that he wasn’t sure it had been an accident.

 **3.**  What kind of person would he be if he didn’t ask himself if they could have been ready? If they could have known. If maybe, when they’d run, they’d gone south instead of North, to New Mexico instead of Canada. If he’d taken his partner and his child into the desert sun, into a smoke-filled room, if he’d been that kind of person, that kind of father, could they have — If they’d gone right up to the mouth of the beast, could they have torn it down from the inside?

In a hotel room with the roof blown clean off, he says, “Do you think that if we’d — “

And Scully who’d wanted to do it all again. Who wouldn’t change anything, she says,  _Yes. Yes, I do. Yes, if._

Above them, braced between thin white walls, the sky stays dark.  
  
  
  
  
  


**4.** It is not Emily. He knows that.  _She_ knows that. They’re a month and a half into cruising the warmer states (although everywhere is warmer, now), parked outside what used to be fairgrounds. A Ferris wheel’s skeletal remains tilt in the skyline. Fossilized. 

 _It_ is wearing pink cotton shorts and a t-shirt with a smiling sun on it and clutching a styrofoam cup. It was lying in the grass, looking straight up at the sky when Scully almost tripped over it. It is dirty but its eyes are blue and its hair is copper, and it is bleeding from a cut in the knee and when he sees that, the blood, red, that’s when Mulder breathes again because God he didn’t want to have to shoot a kid. She’s skittish and skinny and only comes to them when she hears the crisp pop of the can of Sprite Mulder digs up from the cooler in the trunk.

She’s four by a show of little fingers, quiet in the backseat, nails bitten to the quick. Mulder is grateful for the blood on her knees because it makes her human, makes her alive, and also because it gives Scully something to do besides stare at her. She talks low while she patches up the little girl’s knee, nonsense words.

Either she never had a name or she doesn’t know it. She is little for her age. Mulder calls her the Sprite, on account of the soda. Scully rolls her eyes but there is nowhere to take her, and they have to call her something, this freeloader in miniature. Scully turns all the way around in the front seat to talk to her but the Sprite gives no indication that she understands. Instead, she reaches for Scully’s cross, sparking in the light, fascinated, catching hold just for a moment.

Scully pauses, then disengages her little fingers. She turns around in the front seat and stares straight ahead. The road jostles. The Sprite yelps when it does. Scully does not turn around.  
  
  
  
  


 

 **5.**  In motels, the Sprite sleeps in bathtubs filled with pillows and Mulder’s old parka. She talks in trochees and fragments. Her voice is high and clear. They don’t have any books, but she likes bedtime stories. Scully leans against the doorframe while Mulder tells her the plot of  _The Empire Strikes Bac_ k, perched on the lip of the tub.

And maybe that’s what does it.  _Star Wars_. Maybe it makes her think of Will, at eight, at eleven, with his light-up blue lightsaber insisting he be called Luke Skywalker, forging elaborate plots to save the galaxy. Maybe it’s just the intrusion of the familiar, of George Lucas, of bedtime stories, into this bare and alien life. After their son is gone. After she’d burned down their old roots house. Maybe it’s none of it or all of it, but when he comes back into the main room Scully turns on him, vicious and uncaged. She says, “She is not our child.” She says, “You are not her father.” She says, “We already lost one baby you couldn’t protect.” She shoves him back away from her and says she wants to die, which seems to stun her right out of anger. She thinks she didn’t mean it. He lets her think so.

And she cries then, curled up with him in the corner where she’d pushed him. She still blames him, genuinely, he can tell.  _Finally_ , he thinks.  _Finally._  Who knew the end of the world would have its perks. It’s alright. And that’s what he says.  _It’s alright, it’s alright._  She falls asleep in the king-sized bed wrapped up around him, her cheek tacky with dry tears against his neck. He strokes her hair. He looks up at the ceiling simply because there is one.

When the Sprite crawls into their bed, shivering, it is Scully who turns to her. It’s late enough that it’s early, and she must not think he’s awake. So it is Scully who says _Come here, baby_. Scully who, when the Sprite is curled up against her, says, quiet, more like a poem or a prayer than a song, _If I was the king of the world I’d tell you what I’d do —_  
  
  
  
  
  


**6.**  And one morning, when she is probably almost five, the Sprite sits straight up in the middle of the king-sized bed. It is late afternoon. Scully is washing their clothes in the bathroom sink.

“You’ve gotta go get him,” she says seriously. It’s the most words she’s ever spoken at one time. Her hair is a mess and when it’s clean it is red, red, red.

Scully says, “Baby, go back to sleep.” This motel looks like any other, but it is white hot. It is in the desert. It is South instead of North.

Mulder says, “Who?”

The Sprite looks right at him. She grins and her eyelids flutter. She says, “Luke Skywalker. He says he’s on the Death Star.”

Scully turns to him, bewildered, and then the Sprite speaks again. And this time there is understanding like cool water, like balance on the edge of something, tentative and firm.

The Sprite says, “He says you’ve gotta come get him, daddy. He says it’s time to blow this thing and go home.” 


End file.
